How Mastery Can Adversely Affect HabitI’ve lately been noticing how my once absolutely rock solid superhabits have become torn lose by pushing for mastery. But what’s even more interesting on closer inspection is how day-to-day the techniques I use to push mastery interfere with the solidity of habits.

Take for example my recent run. I’ve been meditating every morning after getting up from bed, and after my recent hiatus from recording, I’ve got this as my daily SRHI for fixed meditation:

Looks awesome at first. I continue with my normal course of meditating right after waking up. So I’m scoring perfectly. Mid-way through the week I decide to switch up my schedule. Why? Because I’m pushing writing, and after I do my meditation, I feel drained to really do my writing habit.

It makes sense, from a mastery perspective, to switch up my schedule to do writing first. But as you can plainly see, this has caused turbulence in my SRHI scores for meditation later on in the week.

If I look into the actual SRHI test, I notice that it’s the automaticity questions that are really getting me. I can’t honestly say it’s automatic, because the habit has been pegged to the mornings. When I do my writing, THEN meditate, there’s something off. It’s not automatic, I have to think about it.

This is all ok at this level - my meditation has only gone down a few points, and I”m sure it’ll level out. But for other less solid habits this can cause serious problems down the road.

My writing habit, which was incredibly strong, has fallen a part specifically because of hard knocks from another vector - just pushing the habit. Eating has always been unstable because it’s not pegged to anything, it’s a floating habit.

I have a feeling that skillfully dealing with these protuberances are at the heart of success in this entire project.